Disconnection of analog satellite TV: 4 years later (part 1)
Hello everyone, dear Habrozhiteli!
This is my first post on Habr, therefore I will ask not to kick much, constructive criticism on the content of the article is welcome :)
4 years ago, the broadcasting of analogue television channels from the Astra 19.2 ° E satellite constellation was completely stopped. These were the last satellites in the world, which at that time still broadcast TV channels in analog. This event could not pass me unnoticed, and I decided to use the equipment I had to record the maximum number of disconnections of TV channels. How I did it and what came out of it can be read in a series of two articles.
In general, broadcasting in analogue from a satellite, in terrestrial and cable broadcasting is not fundamentally different. The same PAL in Europe, SECAM among the French and NTSC among Americans, sometimes diluted with variousnon- tricky encodings like Syster / Nagravision or Eurocrypt. At one time they broadcast in exotic formats like D / D2-MAC , HD-MAC and others - MAC , but I didn’t find the channels in these standards - the last TV channel broadcasting in D2-MAC standard, Danish DR2, was turned off almost 10 years ago in the year 2007. Here is a video of its shutdown:
As you can see, nothing special - just cut down the transmitter signal. By the way, this was not always the case. To compare the video of the shutdown of the KTLA channel (2009, Los Angeles):
Pretty impressive, isn't it? :)
Unfortunately, not everyone leaves the air like that. Someone goes to the usual night prevention and does not go out of it, someone just cut down the transmitters. Naturally, it was very interesting for me to observe how the 30 German TV channels remaining at that time would go on the air.
Big Analog Shutdown was announced on April 30, 2012. At the time of the beginning of observations of the satellite analogue, the broadcast was conducted from the satellites Atlantic Bird 3 5 ° W and from the Astra 19.2 ° E constellation in the Ku-band. On the Atlantic, there were five French TV channels in SECAM (yes, the very honest Soviet-French SECAM who caught all the Soviet color TV sets), and from Astra - a little more than 30 TV channels and about the same number of radio. Radio, by the way, was broadcasting from the same transponders as TV, simply with a subcarrier offset above the television signal, or instead of the audio track of one of the channels. There were whole transponders, completely clogged with radio. Radio went to VERY high quality, I will not say specific numbers on the frequency band, but apparently the Germans did not stint on the quality and twisted music not from MP3.
Anyway, but everything comes to an end.
Fast surfing on Astra as of June 11, 2011 :
')
The Nokia SAT 8003 S with D2-MAC and Panda Stereo support was used as a receiver on this video (yes, Nokia did not only produce mobile phones).
The receiver looks something like this (the photo is not mine):
Do not pay attention to the list of channels in the video, it was so when buying a receiver and was not updated before recording. Some channels in 2011 did not change the transponders and remained in the same positions that they broadcast in the distant 90s. At 3:38 you can see how the receiver mistakenly took the usual PAL signal for the D2-MAC and tried to decode it, which naturally it did not work.
As you can see, there are a decent number of channels, but of them there are a lot of TV shops, watchable in my opinion was only Eurosport , Sport 1 and Viva . Radio is also present, but not everything is tuned on the receiver.
The same thing, only on the receiver easier and a day later (why? There may be an error in the dates):
Here the Echostar SR-90 receiver has already been used, you can compare the image quality with Nokia and Ehostar - there is a difference. The capture card is the same in both cases, the wires are the same :)
October 1, 2011 Channel 21 Shop leaves the air. Not a very interesting event, at the time I was studying at the bargain and it wasn’t enough to turn off some kind of TV shop.
Another zapping December 3, 2011 . Under the spoiler, especially nothing interesting. The same channels (except for the severed TV shop), the same Nokia.
December 4, 2011 the plate was reconfigured on Atlantic Bird 3 to try to catch the French. It seems like Brest got into the coverage area, therefore, it was decided to take a chance and turn the plate ... At first, the trial version was “from the hand” because the plate did not turn to 5W, after a successful attempt to take this satellite the second bracket was suspended and the plate was hung on the other wall of the house.
To what I would like to pay attention: on this satellite the analog coding Syster / Nagravision was used! 2011, everyone is sitting on the figure, and the French code their Canal + in Nagravision! For me it was a great discovery. Here's what a scrambled signal looks like:
The whole essence of the encoding was to rearrange the lines in the frame. The decoder must, according to its algorithm, rearrange the lines in such a way as to get the original frame at the output. There is a plugin for VirtualDub called NagraDub that successfully decodes this kind of video.
Here is an example of a decoded excerpt above:
UPD: Somehow found zpping with Atlantic Bird 3 as of June 11, 2011 . Apparently, I attempted to take it six months before the outages in December:
From December 2011 on the Atlantic, the French chopped off almost everything (ha-ha, there were only 5 left) channels and let information channel with a description, instead, how to do it to catch in the figure. The same video on the replay was spinning on this channel, here it is:
I note once again that the broadcast goes in the most honest SECAM. The picture quality is quite high, not counting the goose bumps from outside the coverage area.
These dies remained on the air right up to ... Yes, it does not matter, I did not fix this moment. On January 1, 2012, Canal + was also turned off, and on the Atlantic only two transponders with dies remained in the analogue.
The first mass outage was scheduled for late December 2011. On New Year's Eve, three transponders had to go down: DMAX at 11377V, Nickelodeon / Comedy Central at 11421H and Viva at 11612H.
It was decided to write off Viva.
Since it was New Year's Eve 2012, it was decided to put the VHS-VCR with the ability to record in LP and HiFi stereo sound, the receiver and twist one of the plates from HotBird to Astra on the balcony. The second remained to hang on NTV + Eutelsat 36E and delight us with the New Year's disco of the 80s.
The estimated off time was calculated: I assumed that the channel would be turned off at midnight German time. But either the first champagne had an effect on me, or the Germans had crossed something, but out of 8 hours of recording on the tape, the channel turned off at 7:55. That is, 5 minutes before the end of the E-240 tape.
Here's what it looked like:
Nothing interesting, exactly on schedule at midnight for some time the carrier was turned off (and, possibly, immediately transferred to DVB). Further interference can be explained by the operation of the APSG receiver and the adjustment to the adjacent transponder.
119 days left until the big outage ...
To be continued...
PS Come to my channel on YT. The channel is mainly devoted to the subject of old TV. I try to collect old screensavers, announcements and other interesting things that were broadcast on TV in the distant 80-90s.
PPS And I can not take advantage of the moment and not to say that we will soon open the first real museum of retrocomputers in Minsk. Come and subscribe to our group in vk . We are opening soon, so stay tuned :)
I will take my leave for this.
This is my first post on Habr, therefore I will ask not to kick much, constructive criticism on the content of the article is welcome :)
4 years ago, the broadcasting of analogue television channels from the Astra 19.2 ° E satellite constellation was completely stopped. These were the last satellites in the world, which at that time still broadcast TV channels in analog. This event could not pass me unnoticed, and I decided to use the equipment I had to record the maximum number of disconnections of TV channels. How I did it and what came out of it can be read in a series of two articles.
Great lyrical introduction
As a child, a cable television operator Vizit worked in our area. The subscription was very expensive (as far as I remember, for 1999 the monthly subscription was about 25 bucks, which by the standards of a city like Brest was a pleasure for the rich, whom we did not consider ourselves to be). Now this operator exists, though under a different name. So, these guys had such a lethal signal that we could without any problems receive their channels on the nearby RK-75 cable neatly laid parallel to their cable, going from the collective antenna to us. There were other tricks that I’m not going to write about here, otherwise it’s not enough ... In general, we could watch TV channels without a subscription, though in a noisy quality, but this was different than a few standard channels from the collective + Poles to the decimal eight. .
The guys broadcast mostly analogue from Astra in German (sometimes English), later channels from NTV + appeared (I remember very well the coded analogue Our Cinema, which for some reason hung on the air for almost 3 days and then was replaced by something else), then already switched to broadcast from the numbers. When reconfiguring the TV channels, these guys did not turn off the air in the cable, and you could see the whole process of setting, changing the parameters, and looking out of the window, you could see men picking on the roof with a 5-meter (or more? From memory hard to say) reflector. It fascinated me very much, and I loved to look at these unfamiliar words “Transponder”, “FEC”, “Polarization” for hours. Then I was only 7 years old ... These shots slammed into my memory very much.
A long childhood dream - to put a plate in my room and learn how to receive satellite TV channels was realized only in 2010, when I entered the university and moved to permanent residence from Brest to Minsk. Literally from the first scholarship, the cheapest at the time of sale set of analog TV was bought - a stainless steel round plate with a diameter of 0.6m, an Amstrad converter with a KS = 1.2dB, a receiver of the same brand without an OSD with a four-digit seven-segment indicator. For all this good was given as much as $ 15 - a third of the scholarship!
Since we lived with the guys on the set, they were afraid to hang the plate to the hospital. They tried to catch them with a “mop” - they took and screwed a plate on a wooden mop, put it out of the window and tried to catch something. It was late at night, trees were on the way to the 19th degree, and of all the attempts we were lucky to catch the useful signal for only 3-4 seconds. On the TV "Horizon" slipped some grannies, zombies, was visible logo channel ZDF. This was more than enough for us and we were satisfied we went to celebrate this business with ajar of foam , we didn’t drink beer in the first course and in general beer is bad :)
The photo of this action, unfortunately, has not survived.
Next was the purchase of the Dreambox DM500, a motor support, kindly donated by a friend from Germany, a nearly dropped 1.2m plate from the height of the 9th floor, etc. But this is more a topic for a separate article :)
Why am I all ... Since already in 2010 it was clear that the analogue from the satellite would inevitably go away (wastefully occupying the entire transponder band for one channel and 2-3 radios), I decided to capture all this action.
The guys broadcast mostly analogue from Astra in German (sometimes English), later channels from NTV + appeared (I remember very well the coded analogue Our Cinema, which for some reason hung on the air for almost 3 days and then was replaced by something else), then already switched to broadcast from the numbers. When reconfiguring the TV channels, these guys did not turn off the air in the cable, and you could see the whole process of setting, changing the parameters, and looking out of the window, you could see men picking on the roof with a 5-meter (or more? From memory hard to say) reflector. It fascinated me very much, and I loved to look at these unfamiliar words “Transponder”, “FEC”, “Polarization” for hours. Then I was only 7 years old ... These shots slammed into my memory very much.
A long childhood dream - to put a plate in my room and learn how to receive satellite TV channels was realized only in 2010, when I entered the university and moved to permanent residence from Brest to Minsk. Literally from the first scholarship, the cheapest at the time of sale set of analog TV was bought - a stainless steel round plate with a diameter of 0.6m, an Amstrad converter with a KS = 1.2dB, a receiver of the same brand without an OSD with a four-digit seven-segment indicator. For all this good was given as much as $ 15 - a third of the scholarship!
Since we lived with the guys on the set, they were afraid to hang the plate to the hospital. They tried to catch them with a “mop” - they took and screwed a plate on a wooden mop, put it out of the window and tried to catch something. It was late at night, trees were on the way to the 19th degree, and of all the attempts we were lucky to catch the useful signal for only 3-4 seconds. On the TV "Horizon" slipped some grannies, zombies, was visible logo channel ZDF. This was more than enough for us and we were satisfied we went to celebrate this business with a
The photo of this action, unfortunately, has not survived.
Next was the purchase of the Dreambox DM500, a motor support, kindly donated by a friend from Germany, a nearly dropped 1.2m plate from the height of the 9th floor, etc. But this is more a topic for a separate article :)
Why am I all ... Since already in 2010 it was clear that the analogue from the satellite would inevitably go away (wastefully occupying the entire transponder band for one channel and 2-3 radios), I decided to capture all this action.
In general, broadcasting in analogue from a satellite, in terrestrial and cable broadcasting is not fundamentally different. The same PAL in Europe, SECAM among the French and NTSC among Americans, sometimes diluted with various
As you can see, nothing special - just cut down the transmitter signal. By the way, this was not always the case. To compare the video of the shutdown of the KTLA channel (2009, Los Angeles):
Pretty impressive, isn't it? :)
Unfortunately, not everyone leaves the air like that. Someone goes to the usual night prevention and does not go out of it, someone just cut down the transmitters. Naturally, it was very interesting for me to observe how the 30 German TV channels remaining at that time would go on the air.
Big Analog Shutdown was announced on April 30, 2012. At the time of the beginning of observations of the satellite analogue, the broadcast was conducted from the satellites Atlantic Bird 3 5 ° W and from the Astra 19.2 ° E constellation in the Ku-band. On the Atlantic, there were five French TV channels in SECAM (yes, the very honest Soviet-French SECAM who caught all the Soviet color TV sets), and from Astra - a little more than 30 TV channels and about the same number of radio. Radio, by the way, was broadcasting from the same transponders as TV, simply with a subcarrier offset above the television signal, or instead of the audio track of one of the channels. There were whole transponders, completely clogged with radio. Radio went to VERY high quality, I will not say specific numbers on the frequency band, but apparently the Germans did not stint on the quality and twisted music not from MP3.
Anyway, but everything comes to an end.
Fast surfing on Astra as of June 11, 2011 :
')
The Nokia SAT 8003 S with D2-MAC and Panda Stereo support was used as a receiver on this video (yes, Nokia did not only produce mobile phones).
The receiver looks something like this (the photo is not mine):
Do not pay attention to the list of channels in the video, it was so when buying a receiver and was not updated before recording. Some channels in 2011 did not change the transponders and remained in the same positions that they broadcast in the distant 90s. At 3:38 you can see how the receiver mistakenly took the usual PAL signal for the D2-MAC and tried to decode it, which naturally it did not work.
As you can see, there are a decent number of channels, but of them there are a lot of TV shops, watchable in my opinion was only Eurosport , Sport 1 and Viva . Radio is also present, but not everything is tuned on the receiver.
The same thing, only on the receiver easier and a day later (why? There may be an error in the dates):
Here the Echostar SR-90 receiver has already been used, you can compare the image quality with Nokia and Ehostar - there is a difference. The capture card is the same in both cases, the wires are the same :)
October 1, 2011 Channel 21 Shop leaves the air. Not a very interesting event, at the time I was studying at the bargain and it wasn’t enough to turn off some kind of TV shop.
Another zapping December 3, 2011 . Under the spoiler, especially nothing interesting. The same channels (except for the severed TV shop), the same Nokia.
Zapping Astra December 3, 2011
December 4, 2011 the plate was reconfigured on Atlantic Bird 3 to try to catch the French. It seems like Brest got into the coverage area, therefore, it was decided to take a chance and turn the plate ... At first, the trial version was “from the hand” because the plate did not turn to 5W, after a successful attempt to take this satellite the second bracket was suspended and the plate was hung on the other wall of the house.
To what I would like to pay attention: on this satellite the analog coding Syster / Nagravision was used! 2011, everyone is sitting on the figure, and the French code their Canal + in Nagravision! For me it was a great discovery. Here's what a scrambled signal looks like:
The whole essence of the encoding was to rearrange the lines in the frame. The decoder must, according to its algorithm, rearrange the lines in such a way as to get the original frame at the output. There is a plugin for VirtualDub called NagraDub that successfully decodes this kind of video.
Here is an example of a decoded excerpt above:
UPD: Somehow found zpping with Atlantic Bird 3 as of June 11, 2011 . Apparently, I attempted to take it six months before the outages in December:
From December 2011 on the Atlantic, the French chopped off almost everything (ha-ha, there were only 5 left) channels and let information channel with a description, instead, how to do it to catch in the figure. The same video on the replay was spinning on this channel, here it is:
I note once again that the broadcast goes in the most honest SECAM. The picture quality is quite high, not counting the goose bumps from outside the coverage area.
These dies remained on the air right up to ... Yes, it does not matter, I did not fix this moment. On January 1, 2012, Canal + was also turned off, and on the Atlantic only two transponders with dies remained in the analogue.
The first mass outage was scheduled for late December 2011. On New Year's Eve, three transponders had to go down: DMAX at 11377V, Nickelodeon / Comedy Central at 11421H and Viva at 11612H.
It was decided to write off Viva.
Since it was New Year's Eve 2012, it was decided to put the VHS-VCR with the ability to record in LP and HiFi stereo sound, the receiver and twist one of the plates from HotBird to Astra on the balcony. The second remained to hang on NTV + Eutelsat 36E and delight us with the New Year's disco of the 80s.
The estimated off time was calculated: I assumed that the channel would be turned off at midnight German time. But either the first champagne had an effect on me, or the Germans had crossed something, but out of 8 hours of recording on the tape, the channel turned off at 7:55. That is, 5 minutes before the end of the E-240 tape.
Here's what it looked like:
Nothing interesting, exactly on schedule at midnight for some time the carrier was turned off (and, possibly, immediately transferred to DVB). Further interference can be explained by the operation of the APSG receiver and the adjustment to the adjacent transponder.
119 days left until the big outage ...
To be continued...
PS Come to my channel on YT. The channel is mainly devoted to the subject of old TV. I try to collect old screensavers, announcements and other interesting things that were broadcast on TV in the distant 80-90s.
PPS And I can not take advantage of the moment and not to say that we will soon open the first real museum of retrocomputers in Minsk. Come and subscribe to our group in vk . We are opening soon, so stay tuned :)
I will take my leave for this.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/282728/
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